Igor Gouzenko - the face behind the hood

The spy who came into the cold, a Russian cypher clerk who
left the
Russian Embassy in Ottawa on September 5, 1945 with documents
that blew the lid off of Soviet espionage activities throughout the
free world.

Mr. Gouzenko defected to Canadian authorities, with some
difficulty and drama, and was moved to Camp X, which had been a base
for espionage activities during World War II. Until his death in 1982,
Gouzenko only appeared in public
with a pillowcase over his head, and took extraordinary precautions to
protect himself. Gouzenko even destroyed any pictures of
himself
on file at the embassy, before defecting. The February 11,
2004
Winnipeg Free Press has a
front page story, with pictures, about a bronze bust of Gouzenko that
was commissioned by Derrick Davy, son of Syd Davy. Syd Davy
is
president of the Winnipeg based Intrepid Society, which celebrates all
things to do with Sir William Stephenson, the man known as "Intrepid",
who was knighted for his services as spymaster to British intelligence
during World War II. Sir William was born in Winnipeg.

Pay close attention to the This Hour Has Seven Days clip
where Laurier LaPierre seems to have a bizarre fascination with the use
of sexual favours by the Soviets to conduct spying on Western
politicians. Ostensibly, Gouzenko was interviewed for
background on the Gerda Munsinger affair,
where a couple of Canadian politicans were implicated in spying because
of their heterosexual affairs with Miss Munsinger. Many years later,
LaPierre outed himself as a homosexual, ran unsuccessfully for office
as a Liberal, was appointed to the Senate by Jean Chrètien,
and is considered to be a long-time socialist sympathizer, even if he
was not an activist. As it turned out, the Soviets were able to
thoroughly compromise MI5,
the British intelligence agency, by manipulating highly placed
homosexuals. There is absolutely no evidence that LaPierre ever spied
for the Soviets, in fact his patriotism is well known, but perhaps
Lapierre had been approached by Soviet spies because of his contacts
with the Canadian socialist movement, and they were aware of his sexual
orientation. This is strictly wild speculation, but in 1966, LaPierre
would not have been able to go public with such information, even if
there was some truth to it.

There was an immediate and sustained effort for decades to
discredit Gouzenko, by accusing him of being an ugly, illiterate
alcoholic who was just trying to get money from the Canadian government
in return for intelligence of little value. Both Igor and his wife,
Svetlana, spent years fighting this smear campaign, and in 1987,
Svetlana not only revealed her own face in a CBC interview,
but she displayed pictures of Igor, to show what he really looked like.
Therefore, this sculpture is not really the first unmasked public image
of Gouzenko, but presumably everyone at the Free Press and the Intrepid
Society had forgotten about the interview seventeen years earlier.

The connection with the Intrepid Society presumably comes
through an action of Stephenson's. Shortly after Gouzenko
died, his family were in
danger of losing their home in Mississauga, Ontario, and Sir
William (who was still alive) put up $200,000 to help the Gouzenko
family keep their house.

Senator Joseph McCarthy is a modern day villain for going
after public figures and accusing them of being Communists in the
1950's. However, the Soviet Union made great use of Communist
sympathizers for espionage and propaganda purposes during the Cold War,
for the express purpose of defeating Western nations like Canada, the
United States and Great Britian. Just because nuclear Armageddon was
avoided, and the Soviet Union collapsed on its own, does not negate the
serious threat of Soviet espionage and propaganda from the time that
Stalin came to power to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Igor Gouzenko's
defection was a turning point in the Cold War, by revealing the Soviet
Union to be a terribly dangerous enemy, and his contribution to Canada
and other Western nations cannot be overstated. The Soviet Union relied
on espionage to get the technology to build nuclear weapons, and it
relied on the propaganda activities of sympathizers in Western nations
to weaken the resolve of their governments to counter Soviet aggression.

The sculpture was done by Leo Mol,
a
world-renown artist who was born in the Ukraine and immigrated to
Canada in 1948; and who also lives in Winnipeg. Mol was given
a
couple of
family photos to use to make his sculpture, and a Google search
produces no other pictures that show Gouzenko's facial
features.
The bust was publicly unveiled this January at the Intrepid Society's
annual celebration of Sir William Stephenson's
birthday.
The article in the Free Press is written by Gordon Sinclair, Jr., who
is the son of the Gordon Sinclair who was well known to Canadian
baby-boomers for his regular appearances on Front Page
Challenge, and who had been a war correspondent early in his
career. These pictures are not reprinted with the permission
of
the Winnipeg Free Press, but it should be impossible to mistake them
for anything but the copyrighted property of the Free Press, and the
author of this web page is not attempting to claim any copyright to the
two pictures below. The picture above of a hooded Igor
Gouzenko
is publicly available through the Canadian
Heritage Gallery.

Update 10/27/08: The snapshot hosted at the CSIS website is now a broken link. However a copy of the image is hosted at Canadian Mysteries,
a website funded by Heritage Canada. In case this link is also
broken in the future, I'm placing a copy of this image below:

Update 02/27/06: Regarding the statement above that
"a Google search
produces no other pictures that show Gouzenko's facial features," CSIS
(the Canadian Security Intelligence Service) now has a snapshot
posted.

Update 02/25/06: I've checked some of the links I
previously provided. Syd Davy's personal web space site is no longer
available, and I didn't save a paper copy of the Free Press article, so
if you want to read the article itself, you will need to contact the
Winnipeg Free Press, or check with a periodical library. I've changed
the link for Leo Mol, you can still find pictures of some of Mol's
sculptures on the Loch
Gallery website but their links seem to move from time to
time, and the Wikipedia link above should be permanent.

I don't want to be maudlin,
but Igor Gouzenko's defection was one of those events that really,
truly changes the course of history.